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The First Ruby FunDay was held at Impetus Technologies, Noida on 22nd November 2008.

There was a lot of Ruby and a lot of fun.
It was an exciting event with a good number of developers in attendance.

People from various companies already working on Ruby formed the largest part of the attendees. Then there were a few Java programmers, who had come to checkout ruby or so it seemed to me. Also there was a group of students from PantNagar College of Technology. I really appreciate their coming all the way from PantNagar for the Ruby FunDay.

The event started off with Sur doing a presentation on Ruby, though he intended to cover metaprogramming, but a battery of questions from the audience didn’t allow him to go beyond the basics. Particularly developers from a java background were having a hard time embracing Ruby’s open classes and duck typing. Everybody enjoyed Sur’s session a lot as he let code answer audience questions.

Then we had a presentation from Aditya Babbar of Impetus Technologies. He talked about the problems faced in deploying and managing a Rails app. He didn’t speak about only the problem, but demoed a solution which Impetus has worked on to alleviate that pain.

Sid showed us how he used to make a Rails app multilingual using Gibberish before Rails added I18n support. Then he showed how life had become easier with Rails 2.2’s in-built internationalization support. His slides are online at slideshare.

After Sid’s session we were served a splendid lunch made at the Impetus Cafeteria.

Right after lunch, was the one of the most awaited sessions of the day. Gaurav built an AIR client for his fictitious app called Blabber! It is just a co-incidence that the application name sounds like Yammer. You can see the details of his presentation on his blog here.

Then Rishav gave a presentation on Sphinx, using Thinking_Sphinx plugin. He showed all the Full text search capabilities of Sphinx, and also proved why thinking_sphix is a better plugin than ultra_sphinx for beginners atleast. His presentation is online at slideshare

Akhil’s session was the last technical session of the day. He carried on Rishav’s introduction to Sphinx to show how Faceted browsing works with Sphinx. You can find his slides also on slideshare

And then we had the musical extravaganza. Sur and Hemant with help from everybody else present at the event, put up a great show with a guitar and their melodious voices.

A lot of presenters were presenting for the first time, but did a really great job. To say the least, we can expect the event to improve as we organize subsequent editions. It feels really great to be involved with starting Ruby FunDays in India.